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Comment by d23 | Hacker News Reader

Not to me. It sounds like they want people who have a wide variety of shallow-ish knowledge (but still an actual understanding of whatever area it is), while also having very deep knowledge in one or two areas in particular.

> It also makes me wonder about their ability to manage people with different skill levels and areas of expertise. And of course, having used Steam, I'm not at all surprised.

Weird that that's the conclusion you come to. Valve is an incredibly successful company with over a billion dollars in the bank. They've produced some of the most influential games of the past two decades (Half-life, Counter Strike, TF2, Left 4 Dead, Portal, DoTA2... it's actually hard to name them all).

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They also haven't put out an entirely in-house game since the Orange Box.

The management failures at Valve have been pretty spectacular, and expensive, of late, it's just that because they are a private company, and because Steam makes all of the money, they can continue to have large expensive failures like the VR or the Steambox until doomsday.

Valve is not other companies, and their position is such that it's not advisable to take any too serious advice from how they run things into the real world.

Any links describing the management failures?

Jeri Ellsworth has been quite vivid about the actual, rather than the idealized, version of how Valve actually works; there's some thoughts here: http://www.develop-online.net/news/valve-s-perfect-hiring-hi...

Besides shelving the VR project that she was reportedly working on, there's also the Steambox which still doesn't exist (the only hardware to even pass prototype stage eventually had to abandon SteamOS and release on its own), the utter crapshoot that is their attempts at virtual economies (TF2 hats: prints money, trading cards: useless boondoggle, everything involving Counter-Strike: possibly lucrative now, but PR disaster after PR disaster with their fans).

Valve spins the utopian image, and generally keeps the veil down enough that goodwill and fandom manage to sustain the myth, but I suspect the cart's been off the rails for sometime, and if it weren't for Steam we'd have long seen a very public failure by now.

Sounds like every company, ever.

> (Half-life, Counter Strike, TF2, Left 4 Dead, Portal, DoTA2... it's actually hard to name them all).

Actually, it's not that difficult. Of what you listed, only HL was original IP.

Valve put a lot of work into digital distribution, and have pretty much owned the PC digital distribution market.

With console and mobile gaming dwarfing the PC market, and big publishers like Ubisoft and EA getting into their own digital distribution, I'm curious to see how Valve continues to grow.

That said, I admire them as a company.

Speaking as someone in the game industry, Valve certainly has it's problems, but they aren't platform problems.

PC is stronger this generation than it was last generation, I'm not sure about the numbers but I suspect that it is ahead of both consoles, and it might be ahead of both of them combined, and I'd expect this to only be get more true. Porting to PC is pretty much just porting the parts that interact with the OS or GPU for this generation, due to both consoles using x86-64.

And mobile is a joke. market might be huge, there's a reason very few established game companies care about it at all. It's extremely unpredictable, and the expected price of games is far below what is realistic. Even if you make a hit, the amount of money you'll make is far from the amount of money you make from a hit on any other platform (hell, it doesn't even come close to the budget of most games). Honestly, I think the only way a company can hope to turn a profit on mobile is with IAP or shovelware (or both), and I don't see that displacing console or PC gaming any time soon.

I wouldn't mind seeing steam displaced, but I don't think it will be by EA or Ubisoft, largely due to the fact that they're both about as popular as Comcast, which seems to be due to them being massively out of touch.

Respectfully I disagree with most of what you're written, wrt to growth.

When I see my friends 3 year old daughter playing Geometry Dash on his phone, I know that the PC can't compete with that.

PC ports are still and after thought. Games use a lobby system instead of dedicated servers. Only a few companies (Valve being one of them) target the PC market first. Pretty much every other AAA publisher looks at the PC market as an after thought.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a die hard PC gamer.

The problem with your original statement is that you have combined Mobile and Console together VS PC, which is a pretty bad basis in my opinion.

PC vs Console vs Mobile would be a more reasonable competition.

From some reports PC gaming market seems very healthy indeed from monetary perspective.

http://usfinancepost.com/pc-still-gaming-market-is-double-co... http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-01-28-pc-gaming-m...

Mobile has been predicted to reach the size of PC gaming, but not to necessary dwarf it anytime soon.

http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/research/3892.html

So certainly if you combine mobile and console it's larger than PC. Says a lot that it takes to distinct markets to overtake PC.

In my opinion all the platforms have their pro's and con's, and none of them are going to disappear anytime soon.

> In my opinion all the platforms have their pro's and con's, and none of them are going to disappear anytime soon.

I wasn't suggesting that PC gaming will disappear. However, it's clear that PC gaming isn't a growth sector. Given that is where Valve dominates, where does that leave them?

Valve may not consider themselves a growth oriented company, but they do look for opportunities to innovate.

I should clarify that I have enjoyed some of their games. Particularly the Half-life and Portal series'.

That said, actually using Steam is an awful experience. Literally 50% of the time, when I launch Steam, it immediately stops and gives me a dialog saying I'm not connected to the Internet, despite that I have other Internet-using apps open and working fine. Quitting and immediately restarting works just fine for no apparent reason. I have several examples of things like this that show a lack of quality in their products. In my opinion, that is usually an indication of poor management as they aren't concerned with the quality of their product.

> they want people who have a wide variety of shallow-ish knowledge (but still an actual understanding of whatever area it is), while also having very deep knowledge in one or two areas in particular

Sure; every employer does. But it's dodging the more interesting question, which is: faced with one candidate who has broad but shallow knowledge and another who has deep but narrow knowledge, which do you pick?

If you're Valve, then neither, because you likely have enough T applicants to not have to settle for a | or a __.

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